Discord users were reporting issues with the instant messaging service on Wednesday evening.

Users were left unable to send messages or access the app itself.

According to Down Detector, issues started at around 5.27 pm with users complaining that they couldn't get their messages to load.

Problems were recorded by Discord users across the UK on Down Detector including London, Manchester, Cardiff and Belfast.

Of the problems reported, 37% relate to problems sending messages while 34% voted the server connection.

A further 29% of problems reported were linked to Discord's app.

Discord not loading

At around 8pm, Discord confirmed the outage on Twitter, informing users that: "We are currently investigating a widespread API outage and are working to resolve this ASAP. More details on our status page: http://dis.gd/status"

The company explained on their website that it had identified the underlying issue with the API outage.

It was dealing with a secondary issue on one of its database clusters.

Discord has informed customers that it has its "entire on-call response team online and responding to the issue."

Users took to the comments to express their frustration. 

One customer said: "We're now on minute 3 without Discord. Remember this day always."

While another said: "guys discord is down idk what to do."

At 8.29 pm, the company updated users on its website, writing: "The database is healthy again and our internal error rate has fallen to nominal levels.

It added: "We are beginning to raise the login rate limit to allow users to reconnect."

Discord updated customers again at 9.07 pm, informing them that: "More than half of Discord users are back online and working normally.

"We continue to work to bring the rest of the users back online."

Just after 10 pm, Discord informed customers that its services were back to normal, posting on Twitter: "Hey @ everyone connection should be fully restored now! Hope you touched a little grass while we were out. Thx for the patience."

It elaborated on its website: "We have fully removed all rate limits and Discord is almost back to normal.

"Over the next hour, some Discord servers may continue to see some issues interacting with bots using slash commands. As part of resolving the incident, we needed to reduce load on our databases and we turned down some parts of our slash command system.

"We are going to complete our internal postmortem process to really dig in and understand exactly what happened here, but we really apologize for the inconvenience if you were unable to login today or had other issues."